When Your Life Falls Apart

The diagnosis arrives in the same month as the separation. The job goes and the house goes with it. Whatever the particulars, you are in a pit, looking up at an edge that is very far away.

The between

The old masters have a plain word for where you are: a between. The space after one thing has ended and before the next has begun. Death is one between. So is the stretch after a marriage, a job, a body that used to work, a faith.

Every between has three parts. First, something dissolves, faster than your understanding of it; you still reach for the person who is not there, still wake with the schedule of a job you no longer have. Second, there is a gap, and nothing in it is solid: no role to play, no plan that holds, no ground to stand on and say, this is who I am now. Third, something new forms. It always does. The only question is whether it forms out of panic or out of clarity.

Do not rebuild yet

Everyone around you will want you to get better, and so they will offer plans: new apartment, new job, new town, new relationship. But whatever you build from the bottom of the pit will be built from the bottom of the pit. The job taken to stop the fear will be a job chosen by fear. The relationship entered to end the loneliness will be made of loneliness. Things built in vertigo lean.

So for now the instruction is smaller than rebuilding. Eat something. Sleep when you can. Let someone bring you food and do not apologize for it. Do the next necessary thing, and only that. Let the old thing finish dissolving; the dead marriage does not come back because you keep setting its place at the table. And do not decide who you are yet. Conclusions drawn in the gap are drawn from vertigo. They can wait.

What is still there

When everything has gone, take an honest inventory of what has not. Something more basic than “at least you have your children.” Right now, reading this, something in you is aware. It is aware of the pain, of the pit, of the thought “there is nothing left.” That awareness is not itself in ruins. It did not lose the job. It was not divorced. It has no diagnosis. It has been present through everything that has happened to you, and it is present now, undamaged.

The old masters say that the same open space in which a person can lose themselves completely is the space in which what was never lost is found. You can check this. Stop reading for a moment and notice what is noticing. Not the thoughts about your situation, which are loud and many. The bare fact of being aware of them. Is that broken?

The opening in the wound

Nobody would choose this. And yet when life runs smoothly, its structures are so solid that the awareness underneath them is nearly impossible to notice. We are the job, the marriage, the plan. Collapse makes a crack, and for a while what is underneath is visible, not as an idea but as the texture of your days. People who have been through a total collapse often say, years later, that they met something in it they never met when things were fine. They do not say they are grateful. They say the meeting was real. That quiet, steady thing under the wreckage is the ground.

In the pit

When the mind spins, breathe out and rest for a moment in the pause at the end of the breath (a short practice). That pause is a between too, scaled down to a size you can hold.

When people offer plans, you can say, “Not yet. I am still in it.” You owe no more.

When the thought comes that there is nothing left, look for the one who is having it, the way the fear is looked at, and rest in whatever you find.

And when you cannot do any of that, which will be often, lie down. The ground holds you whether or not you are practicing.